1. Underneath Blackness: The ‘Black’ Face of Eurocentrism: What’s Whiteness Got To Do With It?
Dr Ornette D Clennon
Manchester Metropolitan University
Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster
Critracemmu

2. Eurocentrism
Performing ‘whiteness’ (Wallerstein, 1997; Wallerstein, 2003; Mignolo & Escobar, 2010)
View of ‘blackness’ as an “artefact” (Fanon, 1986[1952], p. 6) of ‘whiteness’
Africanist presence of ‘blackness’ in American literature that acts as an existentially dialectic tool of ‘whiteness’ (Morrison, 1993)

3. Disavowed ‘Blackness’
‘Blackness’ is disavowed and as a consequence, its alter ego is pathological (Altman, 2006)
Invisibility of ‘whiteness’ in terms of its universal “eye” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 3)

4. Market ‘Blackness’
‘Blackness’ is traded as a market commodity (Collins, 2006)
Is market ‘blackness’ literally just a ‘black-face’ (Gubar, 1997) form of ‘whiteness’?
The market transformation of ‘blackness’ into a commercial hegemony via ‘market freedom’ and ‘individuality’ (Graeber , 2006; De Angelis , 2001; Bentham, 1787; Hayek, 1976)
Globalisation and Postcolonial theory as two sides of the same coin (Krishnaswarmy, 2002)?

5. Coloniality of ‘Blackness’
Eurocentric expansion via neoliberalism has taken the form of a soft global power that commodifies culture (Adorno, 1991)
“Coloniality of power” (Mignolo, 2002)
Positioning commercial ‘black’ culture as a form of global romanticism (Kvifte, 2001) called Afro Neo Romanticism
The use of ‘black’ visual and cultural signifiers (Baudrillard, 1972) to expand its global cultural expansion
Beyonce and Cultivated-authenticity (Benjamin, 1999; (via) Lewandowski, 2005)
Is Benjamin’s “Open spaces as revolution” the same as ‘Contested/subverted/authentic cultural spaces as revolution’?

6. Bibliography
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Bentham, J. (1787). Panopticon: or the Inspection-House. Dublin: Thomas Byrne.
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Collins, P. H. (2006). New commodities, new consumers: Selling blackness in a global marketplace. Ethnicities, 6(3), 297–317.
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Fanon, F. (1986[1952]). Black Skin, White Masks. (C. L. Markmann, Trans.) London: Pluto Press.
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Mignolo, W. D., & Escobar, A. (Eds.). (2010). Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Oxford: Routledge.
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